Korea + Japan 04/17 – Everland
Korea, Japan & creds. My dream holiday.
At many times this trip did feel like a dream as it was very full on, in the best way, and sleep was at an all time low.
Off we go then…
We had an overnight flight without sleep, landed at dawn and then jumped straight in at the deep end.
Original plan was to hit Lotte World on the day of landing, but the website said Atlantis was spiting at the time, so that park was put on the back burner. Dumped our bags at the hotel and grabbed the metro to a relevant bus stop for the park. The resulting journey was about an hour of drifting in and out of consciousness while staring out the window for any sign of T Express.
“It’ll be just round this corner.”
“It’ll be just over this hill.”
“It’ll be just past those trees.”
“That hill must be where Eagle Fortress was” (with 15 minutes of driving to go as you pass under an entrance sign for the resort).
The bus dumps you out at some sort of transport hub/lower car park where you have to catch another bus up another hill into the park.
Day 1 – Everland
A tourist card we had picked up earlier gave us at least 30% off our entrance tickets during Visit Korea ‘Year’ (2016-2018). That’s nice, into the park we go.
“It’ll be just round this corner.”
“It’ll be just over this hill.”
“It’ll be just behind that building.”
“That hill must be where Eagle Fortress was” (it wasn’t).
Foolishly winging our way around without the map and expecting to see 200ft of wooden magnificence somewhere, we walked round the wrong end of the park which ended up being extremely hard on the legs.
There she is.
Armed with many strange stories of complicated queuing systems and mandatory time slot tickets for this beast, turns out it was just in vanilla mode with a 45 minute wait for us. Sweet.
The only odd part about the park system as a whole was the need to show your entrance ticket at every attraction, which made for many wasted hours scrabbling about in pockets upon forgetting every single time.
First impressions of this huge Intamin woodie were generally great. Crazy fun in the first drop and hill, which provided some of the strongest airtime imaginable for what felt like several seconds.
Some ducking, diving and a premature midcourse leads you into the second half, which uses the same layout as Balder, so it unfortunately then suffers from the same underwhelming corners and moments of waiting for something to happen.
Be back later.
We hit a couple of dark rides while down the bottom of the hill:
I remember absolutely nothing about Shooting Ghost, so that must have been great.
Rotating House the mad house was themed to spells and wizards (aren’t they all?) and was reasonable fun as always. The preshow and dialogue was nothing but confusing of course.
We then mistakenly wandered into some kids’ walkthrough attraction a bit further up the hill. Put that down to a research failure.
Did the powered dragon as it might be the only one on this trip (far from it). The staff lady sings as the ride goes round, which is perfection.
Further up still is a nicely themed area with a fun family coaster. Solid stuff.
Still climbing, nearly dying, we made it back to the entrance area to buy some tickets for the Kpop hologram show. Oh yes.
Got the Arrow looper ticked off during the wait. For some reason this ride was almost dangerously funny to me. The subtle offness to the shaping of the track, the quality of the trains and the way they juddered about and then nearly folded into your face during the loops caused a bit of laughter related internal damage to me. Arrow at their finest.
As an unhealthily obsessed fan, the Kpop hologram show was life changing of course. I won’t go into detail.
Pandas next, love the variety on offer at this place. There was meant to be some crappy looking interactive preshow presented by Samsung before getting to the animal enclosures, but thankfully this was skipped. I imagine something caught fire.
That’s the life for me.
From there we moved swiftly on down to the safari jeep tour as time was pressing on.
I guess I’ll compare it to Zufari (bad luck).
This attraction doesn’t try to be something it isn’t. It’s just a truck, with live commentary and animals. Obviously a lot better off for this, as you get right up close and personal with some very impressive creatures and ploughing through the water is deeply satisfying.
On the theme of ploughing through water, we jumped aboard the rapids next. Once again I was deeply amused by this ride. Sitting in a little pouchie of a seat with a tarpaulin over me, feeling both cosy and terrified at the same time.
My favourite Hafema boys are back in action and this time there’s nothing you can do for damage limitation. It got me wet in places that weren’t physically possible from the seating arrangement.
As an extra point of awesomeness, there’s a free bunch of many different styles of heat lamps at your disposal, once you manage to crawl out of the boat.
Having done a crafty loop of the park, the rapids kicked us back out at T Express, just in time to finish the evening with a couple of night rides.
Ascending the lift in the dark and looking out at the park was one of those magical moments. Moments that remind me why I’m in this hobby.
I wouldn’t say the ride had physically improved in any way by this stage, but the atmosphere was amazing and made it a very standout experience. I just couldn’t believe I was in Korea.
Overall I found Everland to be one of those parks that I could just spend the day at doing pretty much nothing, because it’s just a guaranteed great time regardless. The locals definitely seemed to share that attitude as well.
That was an excessively long day though. Fell asleep a few times on the bus back and could have quite easily missed the stop, not that it felt like it mattered at that stage.
Somehow made it to the hotel in one piece and then skipped over the fact that our room had under floor heating that was set to somewhere in the region of 35°C…
Day 2